Wonderstruck

#774
Title: Wonderstruck
Author: Brian Selznick
Publisher: Scholastic
Year: 2011
640 pages

What a lovely, engaging book! I found myself clustering my associations as I read ("The Gray Wolf Throne--also has ambiguous wolf visions"; "Seeing Voices/Hands of My Father--deaf education"; "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder/Cornell boxes?"), not least of which was, of course, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler.

The book functions much like a dream despite its realism, relying on both determinism and over-determination to lead Ben to a virtually inevitable encounter. The big reveal is wonderfully accomplished through the use of the story's media. Even if you are pretty sure what's going on, the way the information is shared with the reader is very clever [highlight to read]: We switch from Ben's sentences to Rose's images, which identifies the old woman at the wolf diorama as Rose, whom we have known thus far only in 1927.

As with The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the illustrations are reminiscent of Garth Williams:


Williams


Selznick


One minor plot problem [highlight to read]: Jaime follows Ben, but doesn't know he's with Rose? This seems unlikely.

In Sorcery's Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger

#773
Title: In Sorcery's Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger
Author: Paul Stoller & Cheryl Olkes
Publisher: University of Chicago
Year: 1989
Country: Niger
252 pages

This memoir/ethnography was better than I anticipated. Stoller, an anthropologist-in-training, returns to Niger (where he was previously in the Peace Corps) to conduct field work. He winds up being mentored by a series of sorcerers. What I particularly enjoyed was his own coming of age as an anthropoloist as he struggled to identify his own anthropological style, ethics, and ways of being with a community as well as observing it. While this wasn't Stoller's only focus, it was the one that most resonates for me in relation to questions of how to bridge cultures professionally and ethically.

Norwegian Wood

#772
Title: Norwegian Wood
Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1987/2003
389 pages

One of the most tiresome books I've ever read, which is especially surprising from Murakami. I suppose I would need to be more familiar with the cultural context of Japan in the mid-1980s to understand why this was such a huge bestseller.

I read this as an audiobook; the narrator rendered the female voices in unappetizing squawks. I looked it up in print. Less intrusive voicing, but it was fundamentally still offputting. "Hey," she said. "Hey," I answered. Do I really need to know every step of opening a jar? The level of pointless detail and meaningless conversation is astounding, and doesn't seem to serve much purpose.

In my own life, I've tried not to spend time with people who are tedious or pretentious. This was 12-13 hours stuck with those people, leavened only by the unintentional hilarity of their praise for themselves for calling other people pretentious, hypocritical, or mindless. I've also tried to spend time with people with whom the relationship is easy, by which I don't mean simple, but that everyone has good intentions. This novel of brooding, lying, sulking, manipulative, game-playing adolescents illustrates everything you don't want to experience on a date. Oh--except for all the blow jobs and booze. I disliked the characters so much that the sex was quite repulsive. (view spoiler) As for the narrator, though we never learn how he got from the end of the book to the opening framing story, he appears to wind up as something like a salaryman--at least, just some nostalgic guy on a plane--like the people he feels superior to throughout. This point isn't made by the novel, but I certainly noticed it.

An emotionally small novel with none of what makes Murakami sparkle, which is the underlying conviction that weird stuff may be happening, and it will remain somewhat inexplicable to the characters and reader, but it matters to the wellness world. This is a novel about things that don't matter outside a tiny bubble of tortured, brittle college students.
 

When You Reach Me

#771
Title: When You Reach Me
Author: Rebecca Stead
Publisher: Yearling
Year: 2009
208 pages

4.5 stars for this very sweet and earnest middle reader. Though the plot is soft science fiction-ish (there are reasons that A Wrinkle in Time is invoked), this is a foil for the story of transitioning to adolescence. You might kiss someone, or have an insight about a friend, or experience a flash of satori when your brain becomes abstract enough to grasp the paradoxes inherent in time travel.

I enjoyed the chapter headings that alluded to The $20000 Pyramid, which suggested that Miranda is now able to find patterns not only in the hexagonal bathroom tiles but also in her life. I felt great nostalgia as she encountered classmates who were suddenly revealed to have spent time thinking about physics, time, and UFOs. I was pleased to encounter another sympathetic dentist in children's literature, not having seen one since Stuart Little. I was especially appreciative of the conclusion, which holds both the promise of the future and the certainty of death, not tidied up, but acknowledged as inevitable. Spoiler (highlight to read): I completely dig that the Asperger-y kid who figures out time travel uses it to go back to protect another kid from himself--he was slow to get the concept of emotion in relationships, but when he got it, it apparently really stayed with him!

Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Novels about Mental Illness

#770
Title: Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Novels about Mental Illness
Author: Darryl Cunningham
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Year: 2011
151 pages

Cunningham, a cartoonist who worked on a Bristish psychiatric ward, tells 11 "graphic stories" (i.e., stories in visual format) of psychiatric disorders. These are not 11 tales of people (though some include anonymized people and one describes the author's own experiences with anxiety. For the most part they're descriptions of mental health problems made more compelling with human examples. There's an over-representation of self-injury, and I don't agree with all of his assertions, but with those caveats, this could be a useful adjunct to an introductory abnormal psychology course.

Vortex (Spin #3)

#768
Title: Vortex (Spin #3)
Author: Robert Charles Wilson
Publisher: Doherty, Tom Associates
Year:2011
368 pages

Audiobook.

Not his best, I think, but not bad at all. This is the third in a 3-book series, so it has some exposition to take care of. Wilson manages this through a couple of strategies--a framing narrative, a text within the framing narrative, a person out of his time element and his cultural translator, and a character who becomes functionally omniscient. There are two main sets of characters, one in the book's present and one in the distant future. The personalities and options of each coalesce with or diverge from its counterpart as the tale unfolds.

I initially thought "uh oh" when Wilson had a character give a mini-mental state exam but attributed this to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR. Nope, MMSE is not described in the DSM (though it is indeed standard practice for the kind of interview the character is conducting). Fortunately, that was the big egregious psych slip-up. In its long temporal jump and some of the issues that arose from this, the novel reminded me at times of Larry Niven's A World Out of Time. The conclusion is a happier version of Bios, though by "happy" I mean "the satisfactory poignancy of the heat death of the universe and its collapse into entropy--but in a good way". As in many of Wilson's novels, part of the climax or denouement is the hero's capacity to really die (rather than dying but being stored as data, for example). I don't buy the moral argument that since a person doesn't pass through a temporal arch but is recorded and recreated, that person is not the person who entered the arch and therefore is not responsible for their own regrettable acts. This seems like space lawyer sophistry. If it were true, any evil Star Trek denizen who used a transporter could simply claim, "I'm not the guy who did that thing--I'm a very close replica of him!"

What first attracted me to Wilson was a couple of his early books where the hero's journey was inverted so that the chracters the reader identified with were those who encountered the traveler, not the traveler him- or itself. (Think Brad and Janet rather than Frank N. Furter.) Wilson's stories have become less overtly Jungian, but no less interesting. This one was more clever in its construction than some, but not his very best.

Ashfall (Ashfall #1)

#769
Title: Ashfall (Ashfall #1)
Author: Mike Mullin
Publisher: Tanglewood Press
Year: 2011
466 pages

Adding to the broadly-based pleasures of a good YA post-apocalyptic dystopian novel, Mullin includes volcanoes, scientific plausibility, incidental characters in a same-sex relationship that is presented in a matter-of-fact way, teens who want to have sex and also are concerned about the risk of pregnancy, and bad guys in the form of privatized for-profit services. Also, cannibalism. Also, volcanic ash in your underwear. Also: generalized smashing.